Director Sarah Gavron describes this flawed but ambitious screen adaptation of Monica Ali's acclaimed novel as 'the story of a woman finding her place in the world, finding her voice'. Rising star Tannishtha Chatterjee, who already has a couple of Bollywood features under her belt, radiates intelligence and understated charm as Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi transplanted to London's East End.

Her arranged marriage to the bullish Chanu (Satish Kaushik, in excellent form) proves stifling, while the drab, grey concrete depresses in comparison with the lush colours of her homeland. Yet the companionship of her children, a forbidden relationship with a younger man and the political upheavals which follow in the wake of 9/11 serve to widen Nazneen's cultural horizons, often in ironically unexpected ways.

Despite the widely reported controversies that dogged its creation (protests from East End Bangladeshis, the cancellation of a 'royal premiere'), Gavron's deceptively good-natured film is solidly positive, a heartfelt paean to independent sisterhood and self determination. Ali's novel might have been necessarily stripped back to its essentials, but the vibrant collage of sights and sounds satisfies on both aesthetic and thematic levels.

It's a slow-burning affair that takes time to reveal its inner strengths, but patient viewers will find the conclusion convincing and uplifting. Extras include an awkwardly edited ICA conversation with Ali and Hanif Kureishi and nuts-and-bolts interviews with the cast and crew.

Most apposite is screenwriter Abi Morgan's summation that the film covers '20 years of marriage, and two kinds of love - young, passionate love that takes your breath away and the love that is like a grain of sand, that rubs and rubs until it produces a pearl'.